The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics

Home , Betar, Negation of the Diaspora, Tom Segev, Tuvia Friling, Yoav Gelber

Daniel Gutwein

ABSTRACT

Politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity. Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: divided memory, nationalized memory, and privatized memory. This article discusses the privatization of the Zionist- nationalized memory of the Holocaust in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s as an ideological product of the privatization revolution through which Israel has gone. The article focuses on the role played by Post-Zionism in privatizing Holocaust memory by depicting Zionist ideology and Israeli politics that portrayed the nationalized memory as oppressive. In privatizing Holocaust memory, Post-Zionism reaffirmed its nature as the meta- ideology of the Israeli privatization revolution and dismantling of the welfare state.

HOLOCAUST, MEMORY, AND IDENTITY It is generally accepted that politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity.1 Collective memory is a presentation of the past formed by competing memory agents that manipulate the past and construct conflicting memories in the service of rival ideologies and political interests.2 Likewise, in Israel, Holocaust memory has undergone several transformations cor- responding to different phases of nation building that have been reflected in the remodeling of Israeli collective identity.3 Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: the divided memory period, the nationalized memory period, and the privatized memory period, each

36 The Privatization of The Holocaust • 37 characterized by a dominant memory whose hegemony is challenged by competing marginalized memories. The period of “divided memory” of the Holocaust begins when its horrors were first uncovered, continues through the struggle for statehood and creation of national institutions, and ends with the Eichmann Trial. This period was marked by dichotomous perception of the Holocaust: emotional identification with the victims, their torment and suffering, and criticism of their docile behavior. During this period Holocaust memory was constructed as a means of cementing the Zionist ethos in the struggle for statehood. The victims’ suffering was used to foster recognition of the Jewish people’s right to a state according to Zionist ideology. At the same time, while the few ghetto fighters were elevated to heroic status in Israel, their courage was used to disparage the mass of Diaspora Jews who went to their death “like lambs to the slaughter”. Thus, divided memory incor- porated the survivors into the Israeli Ashkenazi hegemony, but at the same time it constructed them as its “others”. The beginnings of the “nationalized memory” period is marked by the Eichmann Trial, when empathy with the annihilated Diaspora and Holo- caust victims was unreservedly adopted by Zionist ideology and the lesson of “never again” became the cornerstone of the Israeli ethos of independence. This ideological shift intensified after the Six-Day War, when the initial contradiction between “Israeli” and “Jew” gradually began to fade and the two became complementary concepts. Holocaust memory suppressed the idea of “negation of the Diaspora”—one of Zionism’s basic assumptions—and drew a parallel between Jewish and Israeli fate. The Holocaust lesson was used to imbue the sense of “the whole world is against us” and to legitimize hawkish politics, but at the same time it was downplayed so as not to interfere with Israeli economic and political interests—such as relations with Germany. The period of the “privatized memory”4 of the Holocaust begins in the 1980s. It was one of the ideological products of the privatization revolution that Israel went through and it was influenced by the political and moral dilemmas involved in the First Lebanon War and the first Intifada. Privatized memory turned the Holocaust into a personal experience that is concerned with the fate of Jews as individuals: victims, displaced persons (DPs), survivors, and the ‘second generation’. One of the outstanding expressions of privatized memory was the replacement of the ghetto uprising with its national-collective message as the main focus of Holocaust memory, with individualized commemoration epitomized by the poem “Unto Every Person There is a Name.” 38 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

The privatization of Holocaust memory is one of the cornerstones of Post-Zionist ideology. Post-Zionists claim that the Israeli hegemony has exploited the nationalized memory of the Holocaust to justify the negation and suppression of its “others”: the ultra-Orthodox, Oriental Jews, and Israeli Arabs.5 The Holocaust and its aftermath, according to the Post-Zionist canon exposed the underlying conflict between the Zionist establishment and the individual Jew. The alleged preference for the development of the Yishuv over the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, the manipulation of the survivors’ suffering in the struggle for statehood, and the erasure of the survivors’ cultural identity in Israel—all of these abuses, the Post-Zionists charge, reveal the oppressive nature of Zionist ideology and Israeli politics. Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust played a major role in the privatization of Holocaust memory. It attained promi- nence not only as one of the most comprehensive versions of privatized memory of the Holocaust, but also as one of the most effective agents for its circulation. The concluding paragraph sums up the spirit of the book:

The fear that overwhelmed Israel at the outbreak of the Gulf War was pal- pable. For the first time since the establishment of the state, fear centered on the fate of the individual, his family and property on the homefront and not on collective existence . . . The war did not hit Israelis on the front or in public bomb shelters: it was experienced as they hid in their homes. It was an experience shared by everyone; radio and television broadcasts heightened the sense of national togetherness . . . Although everyone existed under the same threat and [was] gripped by the same fear, once the air-raid sirens sounded their blood-curdling wail, society seemed to disintegrate, each person sat with his family in the safe room, each person alone inside his gas mask. Thousands of Tel-Avivians left their homes like refugees and fled to safe areas in the country’s hinterland . . . Those who remained—men women and children— hugged one another and waited helplessly for the final blow. Never had so many Israelis undergone so Jewish an experience.6

The privatization of Holocaust memory redefined the parameters of the term “Holocaust” in Israeli public and academic discourse. From a historical description of the Jewish experience under Nazi occupation, the Holocaust has been transformed into an overall concept for numerous emotion-charged and morally ambiguous themes that focus more on the Holocaust’s impact on Israeli society, politics, and culture, and on Israelis and individuals. The Privatization of The Holocaust • 39

While ideologically, privatized memory claims to underscore the universal lesson of the Holocaust, in practice, privatization has transformed the Holocaust into an essentially Israeli matter.7 Privatized memory has highlighted questions relating to the Holocaust’s encounter with Zionism and the Yishuv and Israel, and it has turned the Holocaust into a platform for discussing power relations between Israeli hegemony and its “others”, mainly the Palestinians. As an intra-Israeli polemics, the privatized memory received wide media coverage and aroused greater public interest than the history of the Holocaust itself.8 Divided and nationalized memories of the Holocaust, despite their differences, defined the Zionist collective identity of the Jewish majority in Israel, while privatized memory has been used to undermine the legitimacy of Zionist identity and the collective it defined. The privatization of Holo- caust memory has been part of the privatization revolution that Israel has been undergoing since the late 1970s. The struggle over Holocaust memory gathered momentum with the intensification of the Israeli privatization revolution, when, along with the redistribution of economic and political power, the privatization process restructured Israeli collective identity as well as Holocaust memory. Accordingly, the reasons for the privatization of Holocaust memory should not be sought in its contents, as most analyses do, but in the economic, social, political, and cultural factors that informed Israel’s privatization revolution. This article examines the privatization of Holocaust memory in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, by exploring a number of representative texts and discussing the relationship between the privatization of Holocaust memory and the Post-Zionist struggle to adapt Israeli collective memory to the assumptions of the privatization regime.9

MEMORY CLEANSING

In the summer of 1986 the monthly Politika—published by the liberal left- wing party “Civil Rights and Peace Movement” (“Ratz”)—devoted a special issue to “Israelis and the Holocaust: How to Remember and How Not to Forget”. Criticizing the nationalized memory of the Holocaust, Politika preempted privatized memory, giving voice to most of the arguments that would stand in the forefront of the struggle for shaping Holocaust collective memory in the 1990s.10 It contended that the nationalized memory of the Holocaust had become self-righteous, xenophobic, and aggressive; that it served the right-wing view that used the nationalized lessons of the 40 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

Holocaust to advance and justify Israel’s hawkish strategy toward the Arab world and the Palestinians.11 Politika repeatedly maintained that the central role played by the Holocaust in Israeli public discourse and the expropriation of its lessons by the Right transformed the construction of the Holocaust’s memory into a political act. Boaz Evron argues that, “The struggle to derive the appropriate lessons from Nazism and the Holocaust is necessary not only for a proper understanding of the history but also for the internal political and cultural struggle in Israel.”12 Politika concluded that the Left has to formulate its own memory of the Holocaust, one that emphasizes its universal and humanist lessons and accords them a central place in Israeli collective memory. The spirit of the journal’s critique was best expressed in an article by Henry Wasserman, “The Nationalization of the Memory of the Six Mil- lion”.13 He claimed that the memory of the Holocaust victims was nationalized in order to serve Israel’s changing interests, and that nationalized memory transformed Israeli nationalism into the antithesis of Jewish fate. Thus, declaring the date of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as national Holocaust Memorial Day, and not choosing one of the religious dates of mourning and fasting, was a symbolic decision that “. . . broke with ancient Jewish historiographical norms in favor of norms that openly declared and manifested statehood.” Wasserman pointed to the socio- cultural factors that informed the structuring of Holocaust memory in Israel and speculated that

In a country in which half the wage-earners work directly or indirectly for the state, in which males . . . spend one tenth of their lives in uniform, in other words, they are nationalized for one-fifth of their adult years at the height of their physical and creative ability.

It was to be expected that Holocaust memory would be nationalized. The nationalization of Holocaust memory, Wasserman contended, served various interests of the state and its agencies, reparations from Ger- many, for example, but especially political interests. The emphasis that the official memory of the Holocaust put on the ghetto fighters shows that Ben-Gurion was preparing for more wars and believed that ghetto hero- ism would serve as a model for Israel’s future soldiers. Wasserman believed nationalization of Holocaust memory was used instrumentally to justify the iniquities Israel has perpetrated in its struggle with the Arabs, and especially with the Palestinians. The Privatization of The Holocaust • 41

By criticizing the nationalized memory of the Holocaust, Wasserman expressed his opposition to the underlying ethos of Israeli collective identity, that of the “New Jew”, and advocated a return to “traditional Jewish historiographical norms”. He was particularly critical of the concept of the “negation of the Diaspora”—one of mainstays of Zionist ideology—arguing that this concept inspired Zionism’s hard-fist policy toward the Arabs.14 He concluded that since the nationalization of Holocaust memory played a key role in constructing Israeli Zionist collective identity, any change in Israeli policy depended, inter alia, on a change in Holocaust memory. Politika’s critique tried to cleanse the nationalized nature of Holo- caust memory; striving to replace its oppressive contents with a “left-wing Holocaust memory” that could play a positive role in constructing an alternative, humanistic, collective Israeli identity and policy. Politika criticized the Holocaust nationalized memory “from within”. The title, “How to Remember and How Not to Forget”, reflects the importance that the Labor-Zionist ethos put on national, as opposed to religious, remembrance as an expression of broader national and social solidarity. However, by the mid-1980s the Labor-Zionist ethos had already been sundered by the privatization revolution, and the debate on Holocaust memory had become just another arena for privatizing Israeli collective identity.

MEMORY NEGATION

The demand to privatize Holocaust memory was introduced in March 1988 by Yehuda Elkana, a survivor of Auschwitz, in his article “The Need to Forget”.15 His article was published at the outbreak of the first Intifada when reports on “anomalous incidents” carried out by IDF soldiers aroused heated public debate in Israel. The crux of Elkana’s article is the relationship between “victimhood consciousness” nurtured by Holocaust memory and the reduction of its lesson to the belief that the “whole world is against us”, that dominated Israel’s attitude to the Palestinians and made such “anomalous incidents” inevitable. Elkana warned that, “What happened in Germany could happen any- where, to any people, even to my own.” He argued that, “Any philosophy of life predicated solely or mostly on the Holocaust would have disastrous consequences.” Acknowledging the cultural importance of “history and collective memory”, he averred that, “The past is not and must not be allowed to become the dominant element determining the future of society and the destiny of people.” In his view there is “. . . no greater threat to the future 42 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1 of the state of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust systematically and forcefully penetrated the consciousness of the Israeli public.” Moreover, he perceived that the commonly held idea that the Holocaust proved once again that the Jew is the “eternal victim” as a “tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler.” Elkana concluded:

We must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoc- cupied from morning to night with symbols, ceremonies and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of that historical “remember” over our lives.

Elkana’s “Need to Forget” grated Israeli public opinion and triggered a highly emotional argument. It challenged one of the pillars of Israeli identity, the culture of remembrance, especially of the Holocaust, and proposed a radical alternative, the imperative “to forget”. In contrast to Avraham Shlonsky’s classic poem “To Remember and Forget Nothing” that transformed testimony and memory into a personal vow and national obligation, Elkana, as an eye-witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, demanded: “to forget and remember nothing”. His high-profile position in Israel’s cultural scene was another factor that added weight to the article. He was the former head of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University and direc- tor of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. In both capacities he brought Post-Zionist ideas—as a “local Israeli version of post-modernity and Zion- ism”16—to the heart of the public and scholarly discourse. Thus, his article was seen as a groundbreaking manifesto that indicated a new direction. The reactions to the article generally focused on its formal contents, Elkana’s dictum “to forget”.17 However, they missed his main intention: reshaping Israel’s ideological and political agenda. Elkana explained the imperative of “forgetting” by stating that “had the Holocaust not penetrated so deeply into the national consciousness”, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not have resulted in so many “anomalous incidents” by IDF soldiers. Challenging the official explanation, he claimed that these incidents were not the result of individuals’ losing control due to frustrations with the harsh reality of the Intifada. On the contrary, the “anomalies” were authentic expressions of Israeli collective consciousness that induces the individual to behave this way. Therefore, only by emancipating Israeli individuals from the grasp of this collective consciousness, based as it is in Holocaust The Privatization of The Holocaust • 43 memory, will it be possible to stop these incidents. Only when Israelis are liberated from the yoke of Holocaust memory will they, as individuals, be able to forge a proper moral awareness. Elkana’s innovation, therefore, lay not in his description of the problems inherent in the nationalized Holo- caust memory, but in the solution that he proposed. Unlike Wasserman and Politika, that suggested memory cleansing, Elkana rejected any prospect of Holocaust memory being used positively and advocated forgetting it alto- gether. If Holocaust memory oppressiveness stems from its nationalization, as Wasserman charged, then Elkana’s solution is its privatization. “The Need to Forget” was not the only manifestation of Elkana’s sup- port of privatization of Israeli identity. Later he championed the privatization of bereavement as well. Following the wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel in the winter of 1996, he fought the tendency “. . . to see the attacks as traumatic events that justify national mourning.” In order to bring about the normalization of society and state, he announced that, “We have to accustom ourselves to the fact that we are not one family” and deal with terrorist-related events as individuals. “The concern is the individual’s concern and it had best remain within the individual.”18 Privatization of the Holocaust was, then, just one expression of his agenda, while the privatization of mourning was another. It seems that the attack on the oppressive implications of the nationalized memory of the Holocaust served Elkana’s agenda to delegitimize national and social solidarity, thus turning self- privatization into the only moral refuge for Israelis as individuals.

CONDITIONAL MEMORY

During the First Gulf War, the Iraqi missile attacks on Israel’s cities actu- alized Holocaust memory into a living experience, while the “safe room complex” individualized the concept of war. This combination reinforced the trend toward the privatization of Holocaust memory and was the inspiration for Moshe Zuckerman’s The Holocaust in the Safe Room: ‘The Holocaust’ in the Israeli Press during the Gulf War. He too, advocated the privatization of Holocaust memory, but unlike Elkana’s challenging call “to forget”, Zuckerman proposed a subtler, more complex argument that may be termed “conditional memory”. Like Wasserman, Elkana, and Segev before him, Zuckerman criticized the “ideological instrumentalization of the Holocaust” in Israel and the “. . . disgrace of its exploitation and manipulation for purposes that befoul the way the Holocaust is preserved in the collective memory.”19 The 44 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1 ideological manipulation of Holocaust memory, Zuckerman charged, has reached a point where “We shape our entire self-identity by the perverted use we make of Holocaust memory.”20 Israel, he contended, is turning the horrors of the Holocaust into the “unconditional basis of its mailed-fist, conquest-aspiring, destructive security ideology”, a manipulation that is nothing less than the betrayal of “. . . the universal meaning of the Holo- caust’s dimensions and essence.”21 Just when he seems to overstate Elkana’s argument, Zuckerman performs an about-face and attacks Elkana’s call to uproot the “remember regime”. While acknowledging that “remembering is very important”, he emphasizes that the real and essential question is how to remember. Zuckerman rejects the exploitation of Holocaust memory as a means of inflaming nationalistic passions and provoking oppressing policy, but advocates the use of Holocaust memory for advancing a humanistic and universal consciousness in Israel. He admits that Holocaust memory need not be oppressive; positive use can also be made of it in the service of a “resolute universalistic demand that is no longer oppressive”.22 He believes that the dichotomy between “the Jewish” and “the universal” inherent in nationalized memory has created a close link between the struggle for shaping Holocaust memory and the political controversy in Israel over the Occupied Territories. Elsewhere he notes the circumstantial connection between Holocaust memory and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and insists that “A precondition to Holocaust memory with universal meaning is the liberation from the elements of suppression and occupation.”23 Zuckerman maintains that it is not nationalized Holocaust memory that generates Israel’s policy of oppression and occupation, rather, Holocaust memory itself has been constructed in order to justify this policy. Therefore, only a change in policy can bring about a transformation in the content of Holocaust memory. However, the difference between Elkana’s “memory negation” and Zuckerman’s “conditional memory” is false. In practice, Elkana’s imperative to forget the Holocaust, like Zuckerman’s universalization of its lessons, perceives that nationalized Holocaust memory can only be oppressive. Accordingly, they deny it any positive role in constructing a non-oppressive humanistic Israeli collective identity based on universal ethics. As they see it, Holocaust memory can only be employed constructively as the antithesis of national collective identity, namely, as privatized and individualized identity. While Zuckerman and Elkana juxtapose the humanistic aspect with the national aspect in probing the moral aspects of Holocaust memory, The Privatization of The Holocaust • 45

Gershom Shalom claimed that the national and humanistic aspects of Holocaust memory are not necessarily contradictory but may complement one other.24 Similar observation informed the discussion on Holocaust instruction in Israeli schools during the period of nationalized memory.25 In light of Shalom’s analysis, Zuckerman’s argument that Holocaust memory can be either amoral or universal looks like a presentation of false alternatives, just like the two generalized categories they are derived from— collective oppression and privatized liberation.

RESEARCH DENIAL AND MEMORY PRIVATIZATION

The quality and substance of academic Holocaust historiography in Israel has become another arena in the struggle for the privatization of Israeli collective memory. Collective memory and historiographical research are both forms of past consciousness. While collective memory consciously makes political use of the past to construct the future, historical research declares its ideological indifference and its commitment to critical interpretation of the past.26 The mutual interest in the past carried out in antithetical meth- ods, places, then, collective memory and historical research in a paradoxical state of constant cooperation and perpetual tension. The development of Holocaust consciousness in Israel is a classic example of the paradoxical cooperation and tension between collective memory and historical research. Academic historiography of the Holocaust developed mainly during the period of nationalized memory. Leading Israeli academic historians of anti-Semitism and Holocaust Studies played a major role in constructing the nationalized Holocaust memory through their scholarly and popular publications and their work in various research and memorial institutes. In the same fashion, they turned anti-Semitism into a central element in constructing Israeli identity and contributed to the ideological link between the Holocaust and Israeli statehood, a link that served as the basis for Holocaust nationalized memory. While this interrelation obscured the dividing lines between historical research and collective memory, these historians endeavored to emancipate historical research from the grasp of national ideologies by critically examining the foundations of collective memory, to the dismay of the ideological “Old Guard” who condemned the “demystification”.27 Describing this development in Holocaust research, Hava Eshkoli argued: 46 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

The fact that Zionism or any other ‘winning ideology’ concerns itself in the initial stage of historical research with building its own historical narrative is a familiar phenomenon. First, because of the difficulties involved in pioneering research; and second, because man is closest to himself . . . Zionist historiography of the Holocaust has begun to free itself from the ‘childhood malady’ of focusing on itself as part of its maturation.28

Dan Michman discerned two stages in this process.29 Academic research on “the Yishuv and Holocaust” began in the early 1970s and proved to be “very critical toward the Yishuv’s leadership”. In the preface to one of the earliest studies in the field, Yehuda Bauer wrote that the historiography “. . . about what was done and not done in Eretz-Israel during the Holocaust regarding aid to European Jewry . . . is not encouraging.” Michman states that initial Holocaust research in the 1970s criticized the malfunction of the Yishuv’s leadership headed by the Labor Movement to come to the rescue of European Jewry. Unlike the earlier Ultra-Orthodox and Revisionist criticism, scholarly criticism “. . . was based on documentation and research carried out with historical tools and void of any political objectives.” Michman emphasizes that as academic research of the Holocaust developed in the 1980s it underwent a significant change: the more it liberated itself from the Yishuv-Zionist perspective and examined Jewish fate in the context of general research on WW II, the more moderate the criticism of the Zionist leadership became. This development, he points out, ran counter to the widespread trend in public discourse that vilified Zionist policy during the Holocaust. Thus, contrary to appearance, the accusatory view of the Zionist leadership that lies at the heart of privatized memory is challenged by the conclusions of historical research. The moderate, even positive conclusions that began to appear in the historical research of “Zionism and the Holocaust” refuted the Post- Zionists’ charges—which became trendy in the mid-1980s as the Israeli privatization revolution gained momentum—regarding the abandonment of Europe’s Jewry by the Labor-Zionist leadership during the Holocaust. In response, the Post-Zionists accused Israeli academic historiography of covering up Zionist misdeeds in the service of the Israeli establishment. Gradually the Post-Zionist effort to undermine the professional standards of academic historiography became one of the main manifestations of the privatization of Holocaust memory. The link between criticism of academic historiography, the castigation of Zionist leadership, and the privatization of Holocaust memory was best The Privatization of The Holocaust • 47 highlighted in the public debate over Shabtai Beit-Zvi’s Post-Ugandian Zionism.30 Beit-Zvi was an engineer, teacher, and activist for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate.31 He claimed that the Zionist leadership failed to cope with the Holocaust because it had prioritized the interests of the Yishuv to those of European Jewry. It avoided rescue operations when they were still possible, and exploited the survivors’ afflictions to attain Zionist goals.32 The scholarly and public controversy generated by his book centered not only on its arguments but also on the way they were received or, rather, rejected by academic historiography. The debate over Beit-Zvi’s book began as part of the criticism of Holo- caust nationalized memory. Wasserman noted the relationship between the contents of Post-Ugandian Zionism and the way the book was received.33 Academia, he insisted, did not ignore Beit-Zvi’s charges. On the contrary, when it belatedly acknowledged their importance, academic historiography denied Beit-Zvi his pioneering role and appropriated his ideas. Thus, following his demand to cleanse Holocaust memory, Wasserman also called attention to the changing trends in academic Holocaust research, which he described as unfair professionally but not necessarily bound to any “establishment version”. Just as Wasserman’s cleansing of Holocaust memory was replaced by privatized memory, so too his claim regarding the appropriation of Beit-Zvi’s ideas by historical research was rejected by the complaint that academic historiography silenced Beit-Zvi’s criticism in the service of the Labor-led Zionist establishment. The attack on academic historiography was spearheaded by Yosef Grodzinsky from Tel-Aviv University’s Psychol- ogy Department. In a series of articles published in the daily Ha’aretz in 1994–1995, he used the alleged silencing of Beit-Zvi as a starting point for presenting one of the most comprehensive Post-Zionist versions of privatized Holocaust memory. Grodzinsky, who insists that he is not interested “in ‘what happened’ but only in ‘the way the events are represented’,”34 contends that the Yishuv–Holocaust issue reflects the tragic conflict between Zionist and Jewish interests.35 Academic research muffled Beit-Zvi’s criticism, Grodz- insky argues, in order to cover up the absence of Zionist rescue efforts, and by doing so it safeguarded the establishment’s collective Holocaust memory, which is vital for “the perpetuation of Zionist ideology in its present form”. He also believes that historiography has “a deciding influence on the educational system”. Therefore, the “biased interpretations” as well as the “dis- regard and denial” are not the act of “a confused intellectual community” 48 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1 but are part of a carefully planned strategy in an ideological and political struggle whose goal is the suppression of rival versions of Holocaust collective memory. Likewise, the importance of the discussion on Zionist historiography of the Holocaust, he maintains, lies in its definition of “the limits of the collective Jewish identity in Israel”.36 Grodzinsky’s accusations triggered a wave of response regarding Beit- Zvi’s criticism and the way it was represented or stifled in academic historiography.37 Michman asserts that Grodzinsky “errs . . . and misleads” since academic historiography did not ignore the Yishuv–Holocaust question. Furthermore, studies that “were extremely critical of the Yishuv’s leadership” had been published before Post-Ugandian Zionism. Refuting Grodz- insky’s assertions, Michman claims that, “There never was a solid front of historians defending the Yishuv’s leaders.”38 He also rejects the charge regarding the historiographical establishment’s indifference to Beit-Zvi’s book and states that although academia was reserved toward the book’s flaws, it nevertheless reviewed the book’s arguments in various forums throughout the 1980s.39 At an academic conference on “Holocaust in Historiography” at Yad Vashem in 1983—a decade before Grodzinsky’s attack—Holocaust scholars discussed Beit-Zvi’s book at length. Yoav Gelber claimed that while Post-Ugandian Zionism is “a problematic book” from the point of view of “research methodology”, it manages to “. . . set forth a thesis and raise fun- damental questions—some true—that cannot be disregarded.”40 Speaking at the same conference Dina Porat also referred to the book’s weaknesses, noting that similar opinions are often voiced in public discussions, but they only prove the speakers’ “unfamiliarity with the sources” that reflect what the Yishuv thought about events in Europe during the war. She concluded that “This is a classic case of research being influenced by the public mood and by concepts currently in vogue that are projected onto the previous generation that thought differently.”41 Porat’s An Entangled Leadership, the Yishuv and the Holocaust 1942– 1945, based on her 1983 doctoral dissertation, further refutes Grodzinsky’s claims and undermines their factual basis.42 It surveys the complexity of the Yishuv–Holocaust dilemma, and puts on the scholarly agenda all the allegedly silenced issues. Porat describes the bitter debate that split the Zionist and Yishuv leaderships over the most effective policy for rescuing European Jewry. She also shows that during the war sharp criticism was made in the Yishuv of the Zionist establishment’s failure to carry out rescue operations.43 Unlike the conflict between Yishuv and Jewish interests that lay at the heart of Grodzinsky’s criticism, she notes that Yishuv public opinion The Privatization of The Holocaust • 49 demanded the Zionist Executive and Jewish Agency give precedence to rescue endeavors before the Yishuv’s own needs. She emphasizes the gap between considerations of “realpolitik” that fueled the Zionist leadership’s policy and the powerful emotional empathy of the Yishuv—the majority of whom had families in Nazi Occupied Europe—with the fate of the persecuted and murdered Jews there.44 Grodzinsky ignored the fact that discussion of the Yishuv–Holocaust question was part of the development of Holocaust studies before Post- Ugandian Zionism. He also overlooked the disputes that split the Yishuv on the rescue issue, presenting an allegedly monolithic and indifferent Zionist attitude. While he dismissed any disagreement with Beit-Zvi’s interpretation as a way of silencing him, in practice he employed a strategy of muffling the voices that criticize Beit-Zvi’s version, blaming them of being ideologically motivated, an accusation that is merely a projection of his own method. This strategy may be defined as “research denial”. Responding to scholarly criticism of “research denial” in an article pro- vocatively titled “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust”,45 Grodzinsky charged that academic historiography was used by the Zionist leadership to appropriate Holocaust memory by excluding its opponents. Thus, the contribution of the socialist anti-Zionist Bund party to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the role played by Marek Edelman—the Bund representative on the general staff of the “Jewish Fighting Organization” in the Ghetto– were intentionally ignored”,46 as was the persecution of Jews in DP camps who did not identify with Zionism after the war.47 Later, Grodzinsky added two other groups to the list of those that were allegedly excluded and silenced by Zionist historiography and academic research: the Ultra-Orthodox and the right-wing Betar youth movement. He supported the Ultra-Orthodox’s “just struggle” for recognizing their contribution to rescue efforts, and lamented their fallacious claims that made it easy for their opponents to ignore their just claims.48 Grodzinsky also noted that academic research has ignored Betar’s contribution to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,49 and he constructed a paradigm that transformed Bund and Betar into victims of the victorious Zionist historiography. However, since alongside the Bund and Ultra-Orthodox, Grodzinsky appended the Zionist right-wing Betar and Revisionists to the list of victims of the “Zionization of the Holocaust”,50 his attack seems to have been directed not against Zionism per se but against the hegemony of the Labor Movement. While Grodzinsky was conducting his campaign against Israeli Holocaust historical research, an academic journal published by Haifa 50 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

University and the Ghetto Fighters Museum in Kibbutz Lochamei Haghet- taot, devoted a special issue to “Jewish combat during the Holocaust” that included several articles dealing with the allegedly excluded and silenced groups—Betar, the Bund, the Communists, and the Ultra-Orthodox.51 The growing discrepancy between his “research denial” and the actual state of academic historiography, which blatantly refuted his criticism of Israeli Holocaust research, led Grodzinsky to adapt his strategy to the changing scholarly circumstances. Following his stated intent that he was interested in the way events are represented more than in what happened, Grodzinsky now focused on the “political orientation” of academic historiography, arguing that the new generation of Israeli Holocaust scholars is not engaged in historical research but “in re-circulating and duplicating” the official Zionist version. However, while the new generation “assiduously protects the main Zionist theses”, it does so in a more sophisticated manner than its teachers. Grodzinsky contends that although the new generation does not ignore the “defeated” and the “others”, it excludes them from Israeli collective memory by muting their authentic voice and reconstructing it from the winners’ Zion- ist perspective. Thus, the ideological bias and professional incompetence of the new generation of Israeli Holocaust historians is revealed.52 In response, a number of Holocaust historians have pointed out the overt ideological agenda that motivated Grodzinsky’s criticism. They also note the inherent contradiction in his claim that recording the history of the “other” is a way of erasing it from collective memory. Likewise they totally dismiss as unsubstantiated his comments regarding professional standards and historiographical competency of the new generation of Israeli Holocaust historians.53 In the summer of 1995, when Holocaust scholars were rebutting Grodzinsky’s polemical attacks on silencing the “others”, his accusation was further undermined by a media event: the government-owned television channel 1 broadcast on prime time a documentary series based on Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million that criticized the rescue policy of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust, and the alienation of the Yishuv and Israel toward the survivors.54 At the same time, the academic journal Zmanim, of Tel-Aviv University’s History Department, edited by Idit Zertal—a leading critic of the Zionists’ manipulative use of Holocaust memory—published Azmi Bishara’s article55 “The Arabs and the Holocaust: An Analysis of the Problem of Linkage”, that dealt with many of the charges against the Zionist historiography of the Holocaust, and quickly touched off a heated debate.56 The Privatization of The Holocaust • 51

Grodzinsky’s strategy of “research denial” and challenging the professional basis of Holocaust research in Israel rests on two contradictory arguments: on the one hand he states that “academization of social issues” is, by its very nature, a way of “taking sides” that runs counter to the nature of professional, objective, scientific discussion. On the other hand, he argues that Israeli Holocaust historiography fights “a strange rearguard battle” and “is divorced from current trends in historical research” that give all voices and versions equal representation. He asks, “When will academic preoc- cupation with the Holocaust finally become historiography?”57 He turns these conflicting claims into complementary arguments to reinforce his attack on the credibility of Israeli academic historiography, which he claims is no more than court-historiography, and as such “. . . is neither the only one nor necessarily the right one.”58 Grodzinsky further asserts that, in contrast to its scholarly incompetence, by silencing discussion on the Yishuv’s failure to rescue European Jewry, Israeli Holocaust historiography has proved itself a capable ready tool for manipulating collective memory:

A bitter debate was waged in the press in the 1950s on what the chances had been of saving part of European Jewry and what the Zionist leadership had done in this area. The debate peaked at the time of the Kastner Trial but continued to simmer until the 1960s. Later, the Holocaust went through a process of academization: chairs and institutes were established in the universities, and some of those who had been involved in documentation became professors who published a great number of books and journals. Thus it seemed that the period of public discourse drew to a close and the age of academic research commenced. There [in academia], where the free flow of ideas is guaranteed one would expect that the controversy would continue. But surprisingly the exact opposite happened. The debate over rescue did not heat up. It just ended.”59

Post-Ugandian Zionism, however, points to the opposite; it was the continuation of the public debate on Zionist and Yishuv rescue policy. Beit-Zvi’s declared goal in publishing his book was to enlist the Holocaust lesson in the struggle to open the gates of the Soviet Union to Jewish emigration, arguing that the Jews’ situation in Russia in the 1960s “parallels that in Nazi Germany prior to Crystal Night”.60 Post-Ugandian Zionism is only one example of the Yishuv-Holocaust debate that resumed in the mid-1970s. Others are Yehuda Kaveh’s televised documentary series on Kasztner in 1982; Moti Lerner’s play on the Kasztner Affair in 1985 and the 52 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

1993 television drama that was based on it;61 Tom Segev’s The Seventh Mil- lion in 1991, and the 1995 television series based on it; and the controversy over participation by the Bund’s Marek Edelman’s in an official memorial ceremony of the Ghetto uprising held in Warsaw in the presence of Israel’s Prime Minister.62 Contrary to Grodzinsky’s charges, academic debate on “Zionism and the Holocaust”, too, has continued after the 1970s. Moreover, even if Israeli historians would have liked to obscure the polemics, it is doubtful whether they could have done so, since academic historiography is only one of a vast array of memory agents simultaneously operating in opposite directions. Beit-Zvi’s book contradicts not only Grodzinsky’s chronological dis- tinctions but his main argument as well. Grodzinsky’s use of Post-Ugandian Zionism to advance his anti-Zionist ideology blatantly contradicts Beit-Zvi’s strong Zionist conviction. Grodzinsky dissembles this by asserting patron- izingly that Beit-Zvi’s conclusions occasionally led him “against his own political views”.63 In contrast to Grodzinsky’s Post-Zionism, Beit-Zvi was a champion of “Greater Zionism” and saw no contradiction between his criticism of the Zionist policy during the Holocaust and his own Zionist commitment. Post-Ugandian Zionism was a critique of the “Small Zionism” allegedly endorsed by the Israeli government regarding its responsibility for world Jewry while discarding “Greater Zionism” and “its moral realization”. The clear-cut Zionist nature of Beit-Zvi’s argument is implied in the title of his book. He contends that the rejection of the Uganda Plan in 1905 expressed a far-reaching change in the values and agenda of the Zionist Movement that had adopted a narrow perspective giving primacy to settlement in Eretz-Israel before the rescue of Jews in the Diaspora. According to Beit-Zvi, “Zionism’s failures during the Holocaust stemmed from having limited its horizons, which began after the Uganda crisis.” Accordingly, unlike the dichotomy between Zionist and Jewish interests that informed Grodzinsky’s criticism, Beit-Zvi emphasizes that, “In line with Greater Zionist thinking, there is no contradiction between Israeli interests and efforts at saving Jews” and “Wherever Jews are rescued, that’s where Zionism is.”64 It appears, then, that while Grodzinsky attacks the “Zionization of the Holocaust”, Beit-Zvi seeks the “Zionization of the Holocaust’s lesson”. Grodzinsky’s concept of the “Zionization of the Holocaust” is self- contradictory. On one hand, he argues that academic historiography has downplayed the Holocaust and its aftermath merely to a justification of the establishment of the state of Israel;65 on the other, he denounces the alleged Zionist manipulation of Jewish suffering to advance the The Privatization of The Holocaust • 53 establishment of Israel, thereby diminishing in fact, the role played by the Yishuv settlement and military efforts, which are key elements in the Labor Movement’s narrative. Yehuda Bauer has noted that the ideology of “from Holocaust to rebirth” is in essence “pro-Diaspora” and “anti-Yishuv”.66 He maintains that “the Zionization of the Holocaust” detracts from the Yishuv’s contribution to the establishment of Israel. It undermines the notion of “Diaspora passiv- ity” inherent in the Zionist ethos of the “New Jew”, and instead of Yishuv activism it elevates the Holocaust victims’ sacrifice as major elements in the process that led to statehood. Bauer’s thesis launched a debate in “Zionist” academic historiography and those who rejected it emphasized the damage that the Holocaust caused to Zionism’s ability to realize its goals.67 It seems that Grodzinsky’s depiction of Zionist historiography is mistaken, if not misleading, as Michman contends. The commitment to Zionist ideology did not prevent academic historiography from discussing Zionist rescue policy and the contribution of the “others”—both Zionists and anti-Zionists—to the ghetto revolts. In like manner, it did not preclude a debate over the relationship between the “Holocaust” and “rebirth”, nor prevent academic historiography from reaching conclusions that did not coincide with Israeli hegemonic collective memory.68

THE PARADOX OF UNIFIED MEMORY

One of the main features in Grodzinsky’s strategy of “research denial” is to present Zionist policy and Israeli academic historiography as monolithic. He creates this impression by glossing over the mass of nuances and conflicting positions on rescue policy that characterized the Zionist leadership and the Yishuv during the Holocaust and the public and academic discourse on this issue since. He portrays a monolithic Zionist leadership indifferent to the annihilation of European Jewry and a monolithic academic community that manipulated Holocaust collective memory to suit the political interests of the ruling Labor-Zionism. Furthermore, despite his sympathy for the “others”, they too fall victim to his monolithic selection and serve mainly as a background in the portrayal of the oppressive nature of the Zionist establishment. The monolithic reductionalism that characterizes “research denial” contradicts not only Zionist history during the Holocaust, but Israeli politics too, contradictions that show Grodzinsky’s criticism of Israeli Holocaust historiography to be nothing more than an ideological manifesto. 54 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

Grodzinsky’s monolithic depiction of Israeli academic historiography further contradicts his assumption that it reflects the interests of the Zionist hegemony. Until the 1970s, at least, Israeli public opinion was deeply divided over Yishuv–Holocaust issues, such as German reparations or the Kasztner affair. This was also true of the Labor Movement where these divisions were part of larger disagreements.69 According to the basic conception of collective memory, these disputes prevented the monopoly of one memory and produced a plethora of institutions and journals that gave expression to numerous conflicting memories in the service of various ideological orientations and political agendas.70 Grodzinsky’s statement regarding the monolithic nature of Israeli academic Holocaust historiography contradicts his argument that it was politically motivated. He consistently avoids defining the nature of Zionist interests and who exactly makes up the Zionist establishment that academic research serves so faithfully. There is good reason for his elusiveness. Zion- ism was never a monolithic movement; on the contrary, it was characterized by continuous conflicts between various parties and factions. This was especially true for the Labor Movement: the more hegemonic it became, the more it split into rival ideological and political subgroups. The political division of the Israeli establishment was duplicated in the construction of conflicting Holocaust memories that reflected rival interests. Thus Grodzin- sky’s argument regarding the monolithic nature of Israeli historical research that produces monolithic Holocaust memory in the service of a monolithic Israeli establishment is self-contradictory. The monolithic depiction of “Zionism” is not only a historiographical phantom, one that is easy to discredit and refute, but one that also silences alternative and conflicting Zionist voices. Furthermore, public debates and political controversies affected Holocaust research in a way that is contrary to that described by Grodzinsky. In this atmosphere of political rivalry that split the Israeli establishment, various competing Zionist memories could have developed. With no dictate regarding the “correct” Holocaust memory, academic historiography was able to develop freely, raise controversial issues, and voice critical commentary—as indeed happened—without being bound to any single hegemonic version. Grodzinsky’s criticism of the so-called historians’ betrayal, with its underlying inconsistencies and contradictions, is void of any possible inter- pretive value. It combined conspiracy theory ambiance, anti-academic populism, self-righteous pathos, and bon-ton revisionism, which made it politically-correct and at the same time provocative, and turned it into an attractive, curiosity-arousing, media-relayed cultural event. The intensive The Privatization of The Holocaust • 55 exposure, the constant reiteration of accusations based on “research denial”, which turned it into a focus of incessant dispute, gradually raised these ideologically motivated charges to the status of historical fact. All these elevated the “Yishuv and the Holocaust” high on the public agenda, while relegating academic historiography, which had failed to adapt to the new media rules of the game, to a helplessly defensive position. Grodzinsky’s criticism must be examined, therefore, not in the context of Holocaust research but as a political-cultural campaign. Accordingly, the “political orientation” of his charges must be sought.71 Grodzinsky’s criticism of Holocaust research emphasizes the oppressive nature of Zionist ideology and politics, claiming that the Yishuv and Israel posited—and still posit—collective interests over individual ones. The monolithic depiction of Zionist and Israeli politics plays a decisive role in generating the notion that the inherent immorality of Zionism cannot be changed “from within”, and that its oppressive nature can be challenged only by negating Zionism itself. Thus, ethical Israelis can preserve their individual morality only by emancipating themselves from the oppressive Israeli collectives through undermining Zionist ethos with its underlying collective values. In the context of Israel’s political-cultural scene of the 1990s, this meant supporting the privatization revolution. Likewise, Grodzinsky misrepresented Zionist historiography by depicting it as monolithic. Given the contradiction between his criticism of the historians’ betrayal and his skepticism over the feasibility of academic research of sensitive social issues, the only expression he leaves for past consciousness is that of collective memory. Thus, he adopts a fashionable relativistic view of historical interpretation, even if it seems that he does so for polemical rather than academic reasons.72 The monolithic presentation of Israeli academic historiography allows Grodzinsky to scorn it and label Israeli historians as court historians who serve the political interests of their victorious Zionist masters. By rejecting academic historiography and uncritically accepting the memories of the defeated “others”, Grodzinsky constructs an alternative, collective memory, built of rival group memories that are united only in their negation of the Zionist hegemonic memory. While this alternative memory pretends to free the Israeli individual from the Zionist original sin, in effect it promotes the privatization of Israeli society. 56 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

POST-ZIONISM AND THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE HOLOCAUST

Grodzinsky’s criticism of Israeli Holocaust academic historiography is, then, no more than alternative memory—one that is in line with the Post-Zionist manifesto. Accordingly, his Post-Zionist criticism should be understood in the context of Israel’s “politics of culture”, where Post-Zionism serves as the meta-ideology of the privatization regime. In the Post-Zionist vein, he sees “a close relationship” between the debate on the 1948 War, and the debate over “the conduct of the Zionist leadership during the Holocaust”, because in both cases Post-Zionist historians “take not just the winners into account”.73 Grodzinsky’s criticism of hegemonic Holocaust memory in Israel reit- erates the Post-Zionist assumptions. Thus, Uri Ram argues that the Holo- caust “has become a weapon in the hands of establishment historians and sociologists . . . [who] have turned [it] into an excuse that provides moral justification for Zionism and silences all debate”.74 Ilan Pappé rejects the attempt of Zionist historiography “to be simultaneously a site of memory and a forum for academic and professional criticism”. An attempt to transform the Holocaust “into a tool” that exempts Zionism “from academic or moral criticism”, he emphasizes, “cannot succeed and is doomed to failure.”75 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin criticized the marginalization of Beit-Zvi and states that “The question is not whether his accusations are correct or not, but that his book was ignored. His claims were not refuted; they were hardly discussed at all.”76 Grodzinsky’s criticism of the Zionists’ alleged desertion of the Jews during the Holocaust recalls the Post-Zionist handling of Israeli policy towards Palestinians in 1948. In almost the same fashion in both cases Post- Zionism condemns Zionism’s immoral activity, accuses academic historiography of being unprofessional and serving the Israeli establishment, and elevates two overtly ideological authors—Simcha Flapan in the case of the War of Independence,77 and Beit-Zvi in the case of the Holocaust—to the level of purveyors of “historical truth”. Thus, Post-Zionist critique posits itself in stark contrast to academic historiography, which is presented as mere propaganda. The close relationship between Grodzinsky’s charges and the Post-Zionists’ manifesto suggests an alternative perspective for examining the “political orientation” of the privatization of the Holocaust memory. Grodzinsky emphasizes that his criticism marks a new era of dismantling Zionist hegemony in Israel. “A new period has arrived. It is finally permitted to criticize Zionist historiography and offer new interpretations The Privatization of The Holocaust • 57 for what happened.”78 The concept of “new times” also dominates the accepted socio-political interpretation of the rise of Post-Zionism as an outcome of the disintegration of Zionist power structures and ideology, and “the waning of the hegemony of the labor elite”. The Post-Zionist alternative is described as a “civilian and multicultural” trend that gives priority to individual rights over loyalty to the collective . . . and to the present in place of the past.” Likewise, the Israeli “historians’ debate” is described as part of the political-cultural struggle that has “. . . branched out into a series of controversies, the most outstanding of which has been the Yishuv’s response to the Holocaust.” The accepted socio-cultural explanation argues that “undermining the official meta-narrative” enabled . . .

Rival elites and non-elites—from the right, left, and center—to have their voices heard, and it turns out that other groups have alternative historical narratives, different from those we have grown accustomed to. Each group has its own political agenda and historical epos. In a civilian-oriented, multicultural society historical consciousness no longer reflects the exclusive view of one social group.79

The privatization of Holocaust memory—in the versions of Elkana, Zuckerman, and Grodzinsky—appears as the meticulous application of the Post-Zionist manifesto that gives precedence to the individual rather than society, to the universal rather than the national, and to the Jew rather than the Zionist. However, this widely-accepted explanation of the “new historiography” is an argument of Post-Zionist ideology rather than a critical cultural analysis of its manifestations. Grodzinsky’s claim that academic historiography should recognize the memories of the “others”, reflects an ideological-political principle: granting sufficient, legitimate representation to the memories of excluded and marginalized groups as part of their emancipation from the hegemonic Zionist narrative. However, unlike the attempt to construct Ultra-Orthodox80 or Oriental Jewish81 memories of the Holocaust that are supposed to serve the political struggles of these sectors, the “others”, whom Grodzinsky is struggling for, do not constitute any recognized group active in Israel.82 Therefore the question is which social group in Israel has an interest in privatizing Holocaust memory. Despite its self-proclaimed radicalism and alleged representation of the excluded “others”, as the meta-ideology of the privatization revolution, post-Zionism serves the interests of the Israeli ruling class. Thus, the primary organ for circulating various Post-Zionist ideas—including the 58 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1 privatization of the Holocaust—is Ha’aretz, the mouthpiece of the Israeli professional and economic establishment.83 Post-Zionism is not fighting the hegemony, nor does it represent the periphery or the “others”, rather, it evolved as part of the struggle between rival forces and factions within the Israeli establishment. Post-Zionist debate must be understood, therefore, as an ideological struggle to transform the ethos of privatization into the hegemonic ethos in Israel, using it as an ideology for dismantling the welfare state and imposing the neo-liberal rules of the game on all areas of life. The advance of the privatization revolution in Israel was hindered, inter alia, by an ideological obstacle—Zionism, with its inherent values of national solidarity and social justice that favor a state-regulated society and economy that preempted the welfare state. In this respect Zionism casts a specter of moral and political illegitimacy on the expansion of privatization.84 Therefore, the Post-Zionist depiction of Zionism as intrinsically oppressive is meant to invalidate the moral foundation of the Israeli welfare state and turns its privatization into an emancipatory act. The privatization of collective memory of the Holocaust and other events in Zionist and Israeli history should, accordingly be perceived as the ideological legitimi- zation of the politics of privatization, and especially of the welfare state as an expression of national and social solidarity. The reasons for the strong public reactions raised by the Post-Zionist critique of the nationalized memory of the Holocaust were, then, not merely the result of the intellectual issues involved. Rather they should be understood in the context of their social, political, and cultural ramifica- tions and the role they played as an ideological prerequisite to the Israeli privatization revolution. Beyond its immediate political objectives, the privatization of Holo- caust memory has additional intellectual implications. The “de-Zionization of the Holocaust” is in effect the “de-Judaization of Zionism”. Holocaust privatized memory completely severed Zionism from the history of Jewish suffering while metamorphosizing the Zionists into the oppressors, some- times accusing them– albeit obliquely—of cooperation with the Nazis.85 Moreover, the presentation of Zionism as an oppressive ideology and politics obtains a broader philosophical and ethical dimension when discussed in the context of “the dialectics of enlightenment”, “Auschwitz and modernity”,86 and 21st century “New-Anti-Semitism”. In this context the privatization of Holocaust memory comes full circle: it began with criticism of the use of Holocaust nationalized memory in the service of Israeli right-wing politics; it continued with the de- Zionization of Holocaust memory in order to delegitimize Zionism; and The Privatization of The Holocaust • 59 it ended with making the ideological and political negation of Zionism a manifesto of the Israeli privatization revolution.

Notes

This article was translated for Israel Studies by Moshe Tlamim (All works cited are in Hebrew unless otherwise noted.) 1. Anita Shapira, “The Holocaust: Private Memory and Public Memory,” and “Between Holocaust and War,” in New Jews, Old Jews (Tel-Aviv, 1997) 86–121; “The Eichmann Trial: Things That are Seen From There are Not Seen From Here,” and “History and Mythology: Contours in the Historiography of Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust,” in Jews, Zionists and Between (Tel-Aviv, 2007) 111–162; Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post Holocaust (Tel-Aviv, 2007); Dan Diner, “Accumulated Contingency: History and Self-Justification in the Israeli Discourse,” Alpayim, 12 (1996) 35–50; Yechiam Weitz, “The Shaping of Holocaust Memory in Israeli Soci- ety,” in Israel Gutman (ed), Basic Changes in the Jewish People after the Holocaust ( Jerusalem, 1996) 473–493; Yehudit Tydor Baumel, “For Eternal Memory: The Commemoration of the Holocaust by the Individual and Community,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, 5 (1995) 364–387; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust ( Jerusalem, 1996) 393–468; Molly Brog, “From the Head of the Establish- ment to the Heart of the Ghetto: Myth as History,” in David Ohana and Robert Wistrich (eds), “Myth and Memory: The Evolution of the Holocaust Myth in Israeli Society,” Tifutzot Yisrael, 19 (1981) 101–104. 2. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Remember: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Tel- Aviv, 1988); Yoav Gelber, “Collective Memory and History,” in History, Memory, and Propaganda (Tel-Aviv, 2007) 349–297; Anita Shapira, “History and Memory: The Case of Latrun 1948,” in New Jews, Old Jews, 46–85; “Khirbet Kazam—Memory and Forgetting,” in Jews, Zionists and Between, 13–62; Amos Funkelstein, “Collec- tive Memory and Historical Consciousness,” in Image and Historical Consciousness in Judaism and the Cultural Environment (Tel-Aviv, 1991) 13–30; George Musa, The Fallen in Battle: The Reshaping of the Memory of Two World Wars (Tel-Aviv, 1993); Emanuel Sivan, The 1948 Generation: Myth, Profile, and Memory(Tel-Aviv, 1991). 3. For views of the periodization of Holocaust memory, see Yechiam Weitz, “Holocaust Memory During the Holocaust: The Shaping of Memory Conscious- ness in the Fifties,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, 6 (1996) 271–287; “The Eichmann Trial as a Turning Point,” Dapim Liheker Tkufat Hashoah, 11 (1993) 175–189; Ruth Firer, Agents of Lesson (Tel-Aviv, 1989) 106–136; Segev, The Seventh Million, 305–391; Nili Keren, “The Subject of the Holocaust in Israeli Society and the Educational System 1948–1981,” Yalkut Moreshet, 42 (1986) 193–202. 60 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

4. One should distinguish between the use of the term “privatization of the Holocaust” in the sense that is used in the present article, which shifts the term “privatization” from the economic sphere to the political, cultural, and consciousness spheres, and the use of the term to note its commercialization. See Moshe Zuckerman, “On Israelis, Poles, and Soaps,” Hed hachinuch, 70 (1995) 15–17. On the use of the term “privatization” to note the ethos of egoism and individualism, see for example: Yair Sheleg, “Zionism: The Battle for the Rating,”Ha’aretz , April 24, 1998. 5. On the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust, see Yehuda Bauer, “Why Did they Murder the Jews and Not the Bicyclists,” Ha’aretz, May 2, 1997; Yehuda Bauer and Israel Gutman, “The Archimedean Point is the Ideology,” Ha’aretz, April 16, 1998; Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “The Mythification of the Holocaust,” Ha’aretz, April 14, 1998. 6. Segev, The Seventh Million, 475–476. 7. Adi Ofir, “On the Renewal of God—The Holocaust as an Anti-Theological Play,” Politika, 8 (1986) 5; Moshe Zuckerman, “Who Owns Memory,” Zmanim, 55 (1996) 106–107. 8. See Daniel Baltman, For the Sake of Our Freedom and Yours: The Bund in Poland 1939–1949 ( Jerusalem, 1996); Sarah Bender, Facing Imminent Death: The Jews of Biyalistok in the Second World War, 1939–1943 (Tel-Aviv, 1997) received much less public attention than works dealing with the attitude of the Zionist Movement and the Yishuv to the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. 9. A close link exists between the present article and my article “’New Histori- ography’, or the Privatization of Memory,” in Yechiam Weitz (ed), Between Vision and Revision: One Hundred Years of Zionist Historiography ( Jerusalem, 1997) 311–343. 10. See the following articles in Politika, 8 (1986): Adi Ofir, “On the Renewal of God,” 2–5; Henry Wasserman, “On the Nationalization of the Memory of the Six Million,” 6–7, 55; Boaz Evron, “The Holocaust as a Boomerang,” 8–9; Ilana Hamer- man, “The Demanjuk Trial—Déjà Vu,” 12–14; Dani Rubinstein, “Time of Sorrow for Jacob and His Redemption,” 18–19; Dan Diner, “Israel and the Annihilation Trauma,” 20–23; Emil Habibi, “Your Holocaust, Our Catastrophe,” 26–28; Yossi Algazi, “What Connection Does a Frank Have with Holocaust Research?” 36–37; Haim Saadon, “Was the Holocaust an Ashkenazi Thing?” 38–39; Yechiam Weitz, “The Yishuv and the Murder of European Jewry: Where Were We and What Did We Do?” 40–41. 11. See Rubinstein, “Time of Sorrow for Jacob and His Redemption,” and compare the ongoing debate between Boaz Evron and Yehuda Bauer since 1980: Boaz Evron, “The Holocaust—A Danger to the Nation,” Iton, 77.21 (1980) 12–15; Yehuda Bauer, “An Attempt at Clarification,” Iton, 77.22–23 (1980) 18–19; Boaz Evron, “Clarification under Clarification,” Iton, 77.24 (1980) 36–38. 12. Evron, “The Holocaust as a Boomerang,” 9. 13. Wasserman, “On the Nationalization of the Memory the Six Million.” The Privatization of The Holocaust • 61

14. Compare: Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile in Sovereignty: Criticism of the ‘Negation of the Exile’,” Teoria Vibikoret, 4 (1993) 23–55; Teoria Vibikoret, 5 (1994) 113–132. 15. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Ha’aretz, March 1, 1988. 16. Ilan Pappé, “Condemning Historical Falsification,” Kol Ha’ir, October 6, 1996. 17. Segev, The Seventh Million, 471; Moshe Zuckerman, The Holocaust in the Safe Room: ‘The Holocaust’ in the Israeli Press during the Gulf War (Tel-Aviv, 1993) 17–19. 18. Yehuda Elkana, “Not a Chosen People,” Ha’aretz, March 18, 1996. 19. Zuckerman, The Holocaust in the Safe Room, ix. 20. Yaron London, “A Deed Perpetrated by Human Beings to Other Human Beings,” (interview with Moshe Zuckerman) Yediot Aharonot, April 8, 1994. 21. Moshe Zuckerman, The Israel Foundry: Myths and Ideology in a Conflictual Society (Tel-Aviv, 2001) 80. 22. London, “A Deed Perpetrated by Human Beings to Other Human Beings”; Zuckerman, The Holocaust in the Safe Room, 22–31. 23. Or Kashti, “Derive a Universal Lesson Too,” (interview with Moshe Zucker- man) Ha’aretz, November 28, 1995. 24. Gershom Shalom, Eichmann, Not in Vain (Tel-Aviv, 1976) 18–19. 25. Haim Shatzker, “Holocaust Teaching in the Test of Time: Necessary Changes,” Yalkut Moreshet, 52 (1992) 165–171. For a general discussion regarding the Holocaust’s place in the educational system, see Firer, Agents of the Lesson. 26. See note 2. 27. Yehuda Bauer, and Israel Gutman, “On the Jewish Soap Affair,” Hotam (weekend supplement Al Hamishmar), February 17, 1984. 28. Hava Eshkoli, Ha’aretz, August 4, 1995. 29. Dan Michman, “Zionist Research in View of the Holocaust: Polemical Problems and Basic Terms,” in Weitz (ed), Between Vision and Revision: One Hundred Years of Zionist Historiography, 152–153. 30. Shabtai Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust (Tel-Aviv, 1977). 31. Aviva Lurie, “The Man who Wrote Too Much,” Ha’aretz, May 25, 1994; Shapria, “History and Mythology,” 140–148. 32. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism, 7–9. 33. Wasserman, “On the Nationalization of the Memory the Six Million,” 7. 34. Yosef Grodzinsky, “Historians or Propagandists,” Ha’aretz, May 27, 1994. 35. Yosef Grodzinsky, “Something is Somehow Missing in this Whole Story,” Ha’aretz, May 3, 1995; compare with the same author’s Good Human Material: Jews versus Zionists, 1945–1951 (Tel-Aviv, 1998) 183–191. 36. Yosef Grodzinsky, “The Rabbi Weissmendel from Bratislava Affair, For Example,” Ha’aretz, April 8; “Refuted Charges; Deleted Affairs,” Ha’aretz, April 15; “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust,” Ha’aretz, July 15; “Historians or Propagandists,” Ha’aretz, May 27, 1994. 62 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

37. Gila Fatran, “The Rabbi Weissmendel Affair as a Bad Example,” Ha’aretz, April 22, 1994; Yaakov Shavit, “Strike Zionism Twice,” idem. 38. Dan Michman, “On History and Charlatanism,” Ha’aretz, May 6, 1994. 39. Michman, “Zionist Research in View of the Holocaust,” 152–153; compare with Yehuda Bauer, “From the Ultra-Orthodox to Ha’aretz,” Ha’aretz, June 10, 1994. 40. Yoav Gelber, “Problems in the Historiography of the Response of the Yishuv and the Free World Jewry to the Holocaust,” in Israel Gutman and Gideon Greif (eds), The Holocaust in Historiography: Lectures and Discussion in the fifth International Conference of Holocaust Research ( Jerusalem, 1987) 470. 41. Dina Porat, “The Historiography of the Yishuv and the Holocaust,” inibid ., 460–461. 42. Dina Porat, An Entangled Leadership, the Yishuv and the Holocaust 1942–1945 (Tel-Aviv, 1986) 493. 43. Compare Segev, The Seventh Million, 70–71, 88–89. 44. Porat, An Entangled Leadership, I, “Absorbing the Information and then Organizing inside the Country,” 200–203; III, “Rescue and Zionist Policy,” 435–493. 45. Yosef Grodzinsky, “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust,” Ha’aretz, July 15, 1994; Yehuda Bauer, “This Is Why Does the Zionist State Exist—So that Grodzinsky Can Express his Disgust with Zionism,” Ha’aretz, July 29, 1994. 46. Yosef Grodzinsky, “A Useful Past, an Unnecessary Past,” Ha’aretz Sfarim, October 12, 1994; “Old Memories, New Historians,” Ha’aretz, July 28, 1995. 47. Grodzinsky, Good Human Material; on the “Holocaust survivors” see Aryeh Y. Kochavi, Displaced Persons and International Politics: Britain and the Jewish DPs after the Second World War (Tel-Aviv, 1992); Irit Kinan, The Hunger Remains: Holocaust Survivors and Eretz-Israel Emissaries, Germany 1945–1948 (Tel-Aviv, 1995); Idit Zertal, The Jews’ Gold: Jewish Underground Emigration to Eretz-Israel, 1938–1945 (Tel-Aviv, 1996); Hanna Yablonka, Alien Bothers: Holocaust Survivors in the State of Israel, 1948–1952 ( Jerusalem and Beer-Sheva, 1994). 48. Yosef Grodzinsky, “Without Malicious Intent,” (letter to the editor) Ha’aretz, October 30, 1995. 49. Grodzinsky, “A Useful Past, an Unnecessary Past,” and “Historians or Pro- pagandists”; see the response to this criticism: Israel Gutman, “Was It Really a Malicious Zionist Plot?” Ha’aretz, July 22; Israel Gutman, “A Strange Critique,” (letter to the editor) Ha’aretz Sfarim, December 7, 1994. 50. Yosef Tamir, “The Order of Government-Appointed Historians,” Ha’aretz, May 20; Yechiam Weitz, “The Voice of Our Fathers,” Ha’aretz, May 27, 1994. 51. “Jewish Combat in the Holocaust: History, Echoes, Legacy,” Dapim Liheker Tkufat Hashoah, 12 (1995). Another Beit Lochamei Haghettaot journal, Dapei Edut, published the testimonies of the Bund fighters: Anka Grupinska, “Talks with Marek Edelman,” Dapei Edut, 9 (1993) 99–116; Anka Grupinska, “Talks with Masha Gleitman-Putermilch, ibid., 117–136. 52. Grodzinsky, “Old Memories, New Historians.” The Privatization of The Holocaust • 63

53. Dina Porat, Hava Eshkoli, and Yechiam Weitz, “The Odor of a Just Provocation,” Ha’aretz, August 8, 1995. 54. On the debate after the broadcast of the series see Orit Harel, “The Selection after the Selection,” Ma’ariv Sofshavua, August 8; Moshe Shnitzer, “The Zionist Fist,” Ma’ariv, August 11; Yoram Brunovsky, “How the Libel was Born,” August 18; Yehuda Bauer, “The Thesis of the Zionist Failure,” August 25; Tom Segev, “The Truly Correct Debate,” Ha’aretz, September 1, 1995. 55. Idit Zertal, “The Tortured and the Martyrs: The Establishment of National Martyrology,” Zmanim, 48 (1994) 26–45; The Jews’ Gold, 415–501. 56. See [all in Zmanim] Azmi Bishara, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: An Analysis of the Problematic Word ‘And’,” 53 (1995) 54–71; Dan Michman, “Arabs, Zionists, Bishara, and the Holocaust: A Political Essay or Academic Research,” 54 (1995) 117–119; Azmi Bishara, “On Nationalism and Universalism,” 55 (1996) 102–105; Dan Michman, “The Arabs and the Holocaust According to Azmi Bishara: Where is the Political Connection,” 56 (1996) 113–118. 57. Yosef Grodzinsky, “The New Psychology,”Ha’aretz , October 19, 1995; “His- torians or Propagandists”; Yehuda Bauer, “Against Mystification: The Holocaust as an Historical Phenomenon,” in The Holocaust: Historical Aspects (Tel-Aviv, 1982) 83–84; Baruch Kimmerling, “History Here and Now,” in Yechiam Weitz (ed), Between Vision and Revision: One Hundred Years of Zionist Historiography ( Jerusalem, 1997), 260–263. 58. Grodzinsky, “The New Historians.” 59. Grodzinsky, “Historians or Propagandists.” 60. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism, 461. 61. Yechiam Weitz, The Man Twice Murdered, The Life, Trial, and Death of Dr. Israel Kastner ( Jerusalem, 1995) 352; Nava Semel, “Kastner on the Time Axis: A Talk with the Playwright Moti Lerner,” in Yoel Rapel (ed) Overt Memory and Covert Memory: Holocaust Consciousness in Israel (n.p., 1998) 159–167. 62. A. Ein-Gil, “Whose Uprising is This, For Crying Out Loud?” Hadashot, March 19, 1993. 63. Grodzinsky, “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust.” 64. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism, 458–461; preface. 65. Grodzinsky, “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust”; “A Useful Past, An Unnecessary Past”; “Something is Somehow Missing in this Whole Story.” 66. Yehuda Bauer, Flight (Tel-Aviv, 1974) 50–51; “The Holocaust and the Yishuv’s Struggle as Factors in the Establishment of the State,” in The Holocaust and Resurrection ( Jerusalem, 1974) 62. 67. Dan Michman, The Holocaust and its Research: Error, Terminology, and Basic Issues (Tel-Aviv, 1998) 242–245, 255–257. 68. Moshe Zuckerman, “The Zionist Dilemma,” Ha’aretz, October 28; “The Terrible Realms of Nationalism,” Ha’aretz, November 11, 1994. 69. Segev, The Seventh Million, 204, 269, 277–278, 295–296, 298. 70. Ibid., 412–450. 64 • israel studies, volume 14, number 1

71. Grodzinsky, “Old Memories, New Historians.” 72. Yosef Grodzinsky, “To Know and Understand,” Ha’aretz Sfarim, June 17, 1998; compare with Ilan Pappé, “A Lesson in New History,” Ha’aretz Sfarim, June 24, 1994; “The Process of Overcoming Pain,” Ha’aretz, August 11, 1995. 73. Grodzinsky, “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust” and “Old Memories, New Historians.” 74. Uri Ram, “From Settlement to Permanency,” Musaf Ha’aretz, July 15, 1994. 75. Pappé, “A Lesson in New History,” and “The Process of Overcoming Pain.” 76. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Historical Awareness and Historical Responsibil- ity,” in Weitz, Between Vision and Revision, 100–101. 77. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York, 1987) [English]. 78. Grodzinsky, “Fighting the Zionization of the Holocaust.” 79. Uri Ram, “Zionists and Post-Zionists: The Sociological Link of the His- torians’ Debate,” in Weitz, Between Vision and Revision, 275, 279; compare Israel Harel, “Toward National-Religious Post-Zionist,” Ha’aretz, October 3, 1999; Daniel Gutwein, “Post-Zionist, the Privatization Revolution, and International Relations,” in Tuvia Friling (ed), Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague (Tel-Aviv, 2003) 243–373. 80. Amos Goldberg, “The Holocaust in the Ultra-Orthodox Press: Memory and its Repression,” Yahadut Zmaneinu, 11–12 (1998) 155–206. 81. Algazi, “What Connection Does a Frank Have with Holocaust Research?”; Ran Resnik, “Holocaust Day at ‘Kedma’: Not Only Jews,” Ha’ir, April 20, 1995; Gal Levi and Tamar Barkai, “Holocaust Day in Progressive Eyes: Ethnicity, Status, and Education in Israel,” Politika, 1 (1998) 27–46. 82. Compare with Haim Lazar, “Responses,” Ha’aretz, August 11, 1995. 83. Alon Kadish, “History and/or History,” Davar Rishon, December 8, 1996. 84. Gutwein, “New Historiography or the Privatization of Memory.” 85. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism, 8; Zuckerman, “The Zionist Dilemma; Avraham Barkai, “German Zionists as Collaborators?” November 4; Daniel Frankel, “Zionist Cooperation was not Collaboration,” Ha’aretz, November 18, 1994. 86. Detlaf Klausen, “Remembering Auschwitz,” Zmanim, 53 (1995) 34–43; Michal Ben-Naftali, “Luther and the Jews,” Teoria Vibikoret, 8 (1996) 159–170.